Mind the gap

In recent courses dealing with civil rights, Taisha Sturdivant, JD’16, and Alvin Reynolds, JD’15, were struck by the way major legal advances often are followed by some measure of undoing. Comparing notes on what they saw as “rollbacks” in voting rights law and affirmative action, the two hit upon an economic metaphor. “We said, ‘Wow, that looks like a recession—an equality recession,'” Sturdivant recalled. That was the spark for a panel discussion they organized at Boston College Law School on March 18 called “Civic Engagement in an Equality Recession.”

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Speaking to about 75 people in Room 120 in the East Wing, three panelists offered widely diverging ways of looking at equality—focusing especially on race—yet each shared the premise that the advances set in motion in the 1960s have been interrupted. Catharine Wells, professor of law at Boston College, was joined on the panel by Tom Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University, and Darnell Williams, president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts. The panel was moderated by Susan Maze-Rothstein, JD’85, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, and cosponsored by the Jesuit Institute, the Law School, and Boston College’s Black Law Students Association.

Professor Wells opened the discussion with a personal story. She told of growing up in a small New England town that had, as far as she knew, only one African-American family. Recounting this years later to an African-American colleague, she confessed to the belief that black families had no interest in settling in such areas. Her colleague urged her to read Sundown Towns, a book by historian James Loewen that detailed the methods used in many northern towns to exclude black residents—a revelation to Wells.

Bringing the point closer to our times, she detailed the ways in which a system of biased standardized testing has impeded racial equality in higher education—including, she said, at law schools. “We know that African-American students are underrepresented in our student body,” she said. But why? She pointed to problems with excessive reliance on LSAT scores, which produce “significantly lower scores for African-Americans.” “We need to question whether or not the LSAT has anything to do with merit, whether it has anything to do with your qualification to practice law,” she said. Touching on the “long and storied history” of IQ testing and standardized tests (drawing examples from Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man), she suggested that built-in “cultural assumptions” can lead to ranking methods that discriminate against minorities. “Being responsible requires that we learn more about our racial history and how it shapes our modern world,” Wells said.

Williams gave an overview of changes in voting rights law. Drawing on material from a booklet called “Protecting Minority Voters,” produced last year by the National Commission on Voting Rights, he detailed efforts throughout the United States to discourage or intimidate people from voting.

The commission gathered evidence at 25 state and regional hearings held around the country in 2013 and 2014. Williams suggested that legislatures have used gerrymandering to dilute the voting strength of minorities, and have created new “voter ID” laws that are meant “to disenfranchise voters.”

The report sprang out of concern that such measures are now easier to put in place, due to the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which allows states with a history of racial discrimination to change voting laws without the federal clearance that was originally required by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Restrictive voting laws are most common where there are more blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, said Williams. “America does everything to keep us from voting rather than encourage us to vote,” he said.

Shapiro began his remarks by noting his interest in “narratives about racial equality”—and his intention to propose a competing, more troubling story. One story, he said, is that in the 1960s a social movement was able to win changes in civil rights laws. “And we’ve seen the results—some awfully good results.” But since then those advances “have been worn away at the edges . . . by lack of vigilance, by not understanding what was happening, by legislative intent, and by court challenges.”

Shapiro described a “liberal paradigm” that he asserted “doesn’t get us very far at the end of the day.” It’s a story about opportunity, resting, he said, on the idea that making strides toward equal education, voting rights, and political representation will reduce inequality.

“We also need to be asking the question,” Shapiro said, whether, when it comes to blacks and whites in the United States, “equal achievement and merit return roughly equal rewards. And the answer is, profoundly, no.” Drawing partly on research he and coauthor Melvin Oliver published in their 1995 book Black Wealth / White Wealth, Shapiro explained how vast the difference is between blacks and whites when you look at asset wealth. The median white family, he said, has about $110,000 worth of total wealth, while the corresponding figure for black families is $7,000—a ratio of nearly 16 to 1. What makes the data more striking, he said, is that when researchers equalize factors such as level of education—comparing white families with a college degree and black families with the same achievement—”it doesn’t change much.”

One explanation for different financial gains among college graduates, he said, is that those who do not come from well-off families tend to support other family members. It’s harder to get ahead when you’re not already ahead. But Shapiro said the persistent inequality—more extreme in the late 1980s than in the late 1990s, but growing again in the recent decade—can’t be understood without understanding the structural pervasion of the racial wealth gap. “There is something very deep, very embedded in American society that goes far beyond equal access,” Shapiro said.

Discussing the panelists’ remarks afterward, Sturdivant said she was especially struck by the wealth gap Shapiro described. “I’ve always been a proponent of education, education,” she said. “I hadn’t realized that just simple access to education, that doesn’t necessarily equalize things. There’s so many other factors that come into play.”